About Me

Saturday, July 28, 2012

The world
we live in makes it very easy to become cynical. There are
explanations for so many things, and people are quick to dismiss what
cannot be proved. Well today I would like to tell you about two
events which you could be very cynical about, but personally I
believe in them.

The first
is a Eucharistic miracle which occurred in Siena, Italy, on 14th
August 1730. As people were preparing to celebrate the feast of
the Assumption a thief broke into the church, picked the lock of the
tabernacle and stole the gold ciborium, which contained the Holy
Communion breads. This was only discovered the following day
and of course there was great distress when people realised that the
sacred hosts were still in the container when it was stolen.
Two days later a priest in another church noticed something white
sticking out of the offering box in the wall. He then
discovered all the stolen hosts. Since the hosts were now quite
dirty, it was decided to put these stolen hosts into another ciborium
and allow them to naturally decay which you are allowed to do in such
cases. However, a few years later when they examined the hosts
they discovered they were still perfect, so they continued to
preserve them. Fifty years later they were examined again and
still found to be perfect and even smelt fresh. To make a long
story short, various investigations were done over the years,
including putting aside other unconsecrated hosts and leaving them
for a similar length of time, but after a few years they had
completely decayed. Today, 282 years later, the hosts are still
as fresh as the day they were found and they are now on display in a
special glass ciborium in the Franciscan church in Siena. I was
there a few years ago and saw them myself. It is a wonderful
thing to see.

The second
event is also a Eucharistic miracle which happened in the 8th
century around 1200 years ago. A priest was celebrating mass in
a place called Lanciano, which is also in Italy. Now this
priest admitted to having doubts about the real presence of Jesus in
the Eucharist. But one day while he was celebrating the mass
the bread and wine actually turned into flesh and blood in his
hands. As he got an awful shock when this happened, he first
tried to hide what had happened, but then he confessed his doubts to
the people and showed them what had happened. The flesh and
blood were preserved and centuries later when science had developed
enough, investigation showed that the flesh was real human flesh and
was actually heart tissue. The blood was also real human
blood. Both are still preserved today. This is only a
very brief account of these two miracles, however, they have both
been officially recognised as miracles by the Church.

Why am I
talking about Eucharistic miracles? We are not obliged to
believe in them, but sometimes I think it is good to be reminded that
these things have happened in different parts of the world, and there
have been several other ones too. Perhaps it is one of the ways
that Jesus reminds us of the gift that He has given us in the Blessed
Sacrament. In each mass we believe that the bread and the wine
really and truly become the body and blood of Jesus in when the
priest says the prayers of consecration.

Why does
this happen? What is the most important thing for most of us
throughout our lives? To have the people we love around us.
Well this is one way that Jesus gives himself to us in a really
extraordinary and beautiful way, showing us that He is with us all
the time and that we can even receive him into our own bodies each
day if we wish. He loves us and wants us to know and experience
that. There is no greater way to give yourself to another
person than this.

The
readings of today’s mass are also all about this. The miracle
of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish is a sign of how
Jesus would continue to feed us with his own body and blood, which He
continues to do today two thousand years after He walked the earth.
It is probably one of the most controversial teachings of our Church,
and the one which often causes people to laugh and say ‘What a
ridiculous thing to believe’. And yet when Jesus himself gave
this teaching it says that many of his disciples stopped following
him. They said, ‘It is too much, who can believe that?!’
So it has been something which people have struggled with from the
beginning. But remember, we are not asked to understand it,
only to believe it.

The
Eucharist is the greatest gift that God has given us, because it is
the gift of Jesus himself to nourish us; not just holy bread, or a
reminder, but really and truly the body and blood of Jesus.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

As a priest, I often find myself in a position which is strangely
similar to what we hear about in the first reading from the prophet
Amos (7:12-15), even though this is 2000 years later. In modern
English it might sound something like this: ‘Look Amos/Murchadh go
and talk about God somewhere else. We don’t want to hear
about it here, we are important people and we are busy with our own
Church. And I might say, ‘You listen to me (Amaziah)! I
didn’t choose to do this. It wasn’t my idea, but God
ordered me to go and speak to you, and now you can take it or leave
it.’

In one way
we priests—and indeed anyone who teaches about the ways of God—are
still in the same position today. We are supposed to pass on
the same message regardless of whether people listen to us or not.
This is not an easy thing to do, as people often don’t want to hear
what we have to say. There is a great temptation for us, for
me, to try to say what people would like to hear, so that
people will think well of me, because like anyone else, I want to be
accepted by other people too. But that is not what we are
called to do by the Lord.

We are
called by the Lord to do a specific job, and that is to tell people
about him and his message. To tell people that Jesus is the way
to the Father, that without him we can not have our sins forgiven,
that he is the way for us to find happiness and that God has made
himself known to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

The message
that the Lord calls us to preach is not an easy one and often meets
with a lot of opposition, but that is beside the point. It is
not my business if people decide to follow Jesus Christ or not, that
is up to them. But it is my job to tell people about the Lord,
as He asks us to.

Pray for us
priests that we will have the courage that we need to do what the
Lord calls us to do. Help us to be strong in our faith. It is
not our place to preach our opinions, but to preach the Word of God.
Our opinions will not help you or nourish you, but the Word of God
will. What we say should challenge you, because the voice of
the Lord, which is always calling us to begin again, is not an easy
one to follow or listen to. Just about all of the prophets were
killed because they challenged the people about how they were living
when they strayed away from the ways of God. They kept calling
them to come back to God, to continually change their ways and many
didn’t want to be challenged in this way, so they got rid of the
prophets. Killing them off was their way of shutting them up.

We
constantly want to do things our own way, but the Lord says, ‘If
you really want to follow me, then you must listen to what I tell you
and follow the way that I point out to you.’ ‘The way’ is
the way of Jesus Christ, but it is one that we constantly need to
re-commit ourselves to. It is not enough to say, ‘Well I go
to mass once in a while and I’m alright.’ The Lord Jesus is
not just calling us to do something once a week, or once a month, but
He is calling us to a whole way of living and thinking that affects
everything we do. The Lord will never force us to follow him;
He simply points out the way to us and invites us. We must make
the decision.

Perhaps it
seems like I’m preaching to the converted, but I believe that if we
really want to grow in our faith, then we need to continually
re-decide to follow Jesus Christ. The world around us may not
agree with us, or like the way we live. Many people today are
deciding not to be Christian anymore, perhaps not consciously,
sometimes just by indifference. But the Lord is very strong in
the Gospels about indifference. He demands a decision from us.

If any place does not welcome you and people refuse to listen to you,
as you walk away shake off the dust from under your feet as a sign to
them.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

A couple of years back I was talking to a man who was telling me
about himself. He said that most things in his life were grand,
except for one thing. He had a terrible temper, which was so
frustrating. And he said, ‘If only I didn’t have this
temper, everything would be perfect.’ I couldn’t help
thinking that this weakness that was so frustrating to him, was
probably also one of the things that helped him to stay close to God.
If we thought we were perfect we would probably also think that
we had no need for God. It is also true that when we are not
aware of our weaknesses we can become terribly arrogant.

There is a priest known simply as Brother Andrew, who co-founded the
Brothers part of the Missionaries of Charity with Mother Teresa.
In one of his books about his experiences, he begins by saying: ‘Few
people would believe the weakness on which the Missionaries of
Charity are built.’ It is a strange statement for most people to hear when we think of people like Mother Teresa and the extraordinary work that she and the many other sisters and brothers do. Brother Andrewe speaks a lot about his own weakness,
although he doesn’t say exactly what it was, except that he suffered
from some kind of addiction. This weakness, which
frustrated him so much, was also one of the things that made him
holy. He doesn’t say that, but you can see it from his
writings. The reason why God did such great work through him,
through Mother Teresa and through so many others, was not because
they were talented enough, but because they were aware of how weak
they were and so they relied totally on God for everything.

The reason why God was able to do such extraordinary things through
the saints is not because they were perfect, but because they were
weak people who continually turned to him and so God was able to use
them in an extraordinary way. It is very easy to get a false
impression of what holiness is: Books can often give us
the impression that saints were people who did no wrong. The
truth is that saints were and are weak people, with just as many
weaknesses as any of us, but they continually turned to God for help
and as a result God was able to work through them in an amazing
way. To understand this is key to growing in the
spiritual life. If the saints were perfect people who never did
any wrong, then very few of us could relate to them. But if
they were weak people just like any of us—which they were and are—then
not only can we relate to them, but it should help us to see that the
same path is open to us, because it doesn’t depend on us
being good enough, rather it depends on us continually turning to
God. That is the key.

There is no one here who doesn’t struggle with weaknesses of one kind or
another. It could be some kind of addiction, it could be a need
to control, an emotional dependency, whatever. We all have
something and as you well know it can be extremely frustrating.

I find it consoling that two thousand years ago St. Paul writes about
the exact same thing (See this Sunday’s second reading 2 Cor
12:7-10). Paul was a very intelligent man, well educated and
obviously very talented. And even though he had visions of
Jesus which converted him and then he went and preached everywhere,
he too suffered from some kind of weakness, although he doesn’t say
what it was. In this second reading you can really sense his frustration
as he says that three times he asked God to take this thing away from
him, and three times God said ‘No, my strength is at its best in
weakness.’ This weakness, whatever it was, obviously helped
him more than he realised. It kept him humble and it meant that
he continually needed to turn to the Lord and ask for his help and
that is why he and so many other men and women were such powerful
instruments in God’s hands, because they relied totally on God and
not on themselves as they were well aware of how weak they were.

I have no doubt that all of us probably feel we would be much better
off if we could overcome our weaknesses. But perhaps these
readings will help us to see that the Lord knows what He is doing
when He allows us to struggle with them. Yes, they are frustrating, but they can also be a gift in the sense that they make us rely
on the power of God more than on ourselves. It also reminds us
that it is not a question of being ‘good enough’ for God.
We will never be good enough, but that doesn’t matter. As
long as we know that we are weak then we will see that we have
someone to turn to who really can and will help us.

So I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast so
that the power of Christ may stay over me.